The carpenters and fishermen come into Ralph’s for breakfast. They used to eye me up and down, but with a baby growing in my belly, I guess I’m not good for that anymore. I have on the brown, canvas, second-hand coat I found at the Trading Post. A man’s coat, but it fits pretty well, and I can’t see me in cute dresses with bows on the front, or tops that say baby on board.
I’m sixteen, and I should be in school. But I just can’t go there anymore. My art teacher, Mrs. Henry, told me it might be helpful if I kept a journal. It could be with words or pictures, or both, but I’m just keeping it in my head.
This is what I can tell you about Ralph’s. I don’t know who Ralph is—some other owner from some other time. Cora and Paul are the owners now. It’s a breakfast place by morning and a bar by night and the only place to go this side of the island. My favorite seat is here by the window where I can watch the boats come in and out of the marina, drink hot tea, eat saltines, and wait. The walls in here are cheap, dark paneling draped with fishnet trim and pirate flags. There’s red carpeting on the floor that smells of cigarette ashes and old fish. If I think about this much longer I won’t even be able to keep the tea down. There’s a giant-screen TV over the bar, a satellite dish outside. It’s a big deal to folks on the island to come here and watch the America’s Cup by satellite. It’s not a big deal to me. There’s a pool table in back, where you’ll find Mom most nights, knocking balls around, getting drunk.
Paul is in today. He brought me my tea before Reva, one of the waitresses, started her shift. He’s quiet and never bothers me. Yesterday Cora was telling me what a good girl I am for not killing my baby. Suddenly I’m the poster girl for pro-life. She didn’t kill her babies right away, either. It’s been more like a slow death. Her daughter, April, weighs about three hundred pounds and sits behind the ticket window down at the ferry landing, with her clippings of male models and movie stars she pastes into a scrapbook. Her son, Arnold, gets written up in the sheriff’s log for drinking in public and beating up tourists. He’s either trying to drink himself to death or get himself killed. Whichever comes first, I guess.
The door swings open. It’s only Hippy Rob. Hippy Rob thinks he’s living off the land or something. I think he’s just living off other people. I heard he’s a computer programmer burnout from Palo Alto. He lives in his tent and rides the community bicycle. Anyone can. That’s what it’s there for. You take it from one side of the island to the other and leave it for the next person. But he hogs it. People move to Nettle Island because they think it’s some kind of spiritual place. Maybe when the Lummi were here, but I think the spirits left when all the white people in bicycle shorts showed up.
I was born in Seattle. They call it the Emerald City, but I don’t remember one shiny thing about it. All my memories are anchored to this island. One of the earliest is the day I met Guy LaPorte, the fisherman with tall rubber boots, his face dark and rough, like a piece of toast. I was playing in the fir needles and dirt behind our house.
“I got a boy about your age,” Guy said. “I’ll bring him by sometime.”
“What’s his name?” I asked, piling rocks into my beach pail.
“North. His mother named him Northernlights, but that’s a little kooky, don’t you think?”
I giggled.
“See?”
Guy came by the house to visit Mom whenever my dad was away. He brought me presents: skipping stones, sacks of candy, homemade beef jerky. I waited for him on the front porch steps every day, hoping he’d come by, wondering when I was going to meet his little boy.
My father, Charlie Iverson, was a logger. Still is, I suppose. He took another logging job out on the Olympic Peninsula, near Forks, when I was six, and we haven’t heard from him since.
The door opens again. The man who comes in is wearing a pink shirt, green plaid shorts, and blue-and-yellow boat shoes with no socks. I don’t know why tourists dress like tropical birds. Maybe they want to stand out so everyone can know how rich they are. He must be from the schooner in the harbor. It’s off-season for tourists. Most of them come in the summer. It’s the summer people, Mom says, who are buying all the property and making the house prices go up. Pretty soon islanders won’t be able to afford to buy or rent. At night I lie awake and worry about where my baby and I will live. I can’t stay at Mom’s. She barely speaks to me anymore, and I don’t think all her drinking will be good for the baby. I want my baby to have a different life than I did.
The tourist orders coffees to go from Paul and then carries them out in a little cardboard tray back down to his yacht.
Cormorants have parked themselves on the bow of Gary Ireland’s speedboat, like hood ornaments—goofy birds hanging their wings out to dry.
Guy’s trawler, the Susie Q., is in the last slip in the marina, where it stays for the winter months. If North is on it, he won’t be able to see me from the deck. If he could just see that I am getting bigger, with his baby inside me, he might change his mind. He keeps running away, though. He passed me in his car one day while I was hitchhiking to the village, and he didn’t even slow down. Another time he saw me at the Nettle Island Market and went running out like a little boy in trouble.
But I’m the one in trouble here.
I don’t think North is on the boat. When we were kids, I’d know if he were standing down in the road in front of my house, even before I went to the window.
The first time I met North was on the Susie Q. It was my seventh birthday, and Guy took the two of us fishing. North looked like a smaller version of Guy, same floppy hair, same dark skin. He stared at me from large serious eyes under long dark bangs, his face and clothes dirty, his hair matted in the back. Mom may not have taken the best care of me, but she combed the tangles out of my hair every day and made sure I had clean clothes to wear.
When we were far out in the strait, Guy checked his depth finder for a good place to stop the boat and put a bright orange plastic squid on the end of my line.
“Just don’t catch any dogfish,” he told me. “I hate dogfish. You know they piss through their skin? You have to soak ’em in vinegar get the damn things clean. You know they eat ’em for fish ‘n chips in England?”
I shook my head.
“Don’t worry, Princess; you’ll catch a fish today, and it’ll be the best damn tastin’ fish in the ocean.”
I caught two dogfish.
North caught a rock cod, and I watched as he hit it with a Seattle Mariners baseball bat, then took the hook out of its mouth and dropped it into one of the coolers.
“Should take this kid to Alaska with me.” Guy said, ashes from his cigarette falling on the deck. “Help keep me in business.”
“Can I?” North smiled, just a flicker.
“How old are you?”
“Eight.”
“Hell no.”
North slumped against the side of the boat, and I wanted to say something to make him smile again, but couldn’t think what.
Guy took a beer out of a cooler full of beers, popped it open, and drank some.
“Here, cheer up.” He handed the beer to North and let him drink. I’d never seen a kid drink beer before.
“There’s pop in the cooler, honey,” Guy said to me.
I’d gotten confused, though, and wasn’t sure which cooler had the dead fish, and which had the pop, so I didn’t take any.
When we got back to the island, I sat between the two of them in Guy’s truck, which smelled like wet boots and dead things. He had a collection of half-dried-out sea plants, rockweed and brain cabbage, and a giant piece of Bull kelp lying across the back seat. When he pulled into their yard, he said to North, “I’ll be home later.”
“Mom’s not here,” North said, looking out the window at the empty yard.
“No? Eh, she’ll be home soon.”
North looked at me before getting out of the truck and said, “Bye.” It was the only time he’d spoken to me.
He was still standing in the yard, watching, as we drove away.
For my birthday dinner, Mom had made a white cake with pink canned frosting, and Guy
grilled up the cod that North had caught. For the first time I wished Guy would go home early. I was worried North might still be alone. But Guy and Mom finished two bottles of Seagram’s and 7UP, and the only place he went was with Mom into her bedroom.
I sat at the kitchen table with the leftovers and all the dirty dishes. I stuck my finger into the cake and licked the frosting off, then made a neat pile out of the dishes and carried them to the sink, where I stood on a beer crate and washed them.
Before dark, I saw North running past our house with a net that was almost as big as he was. It was the first time I had seen him out on our road.
“Where are you going?” I called after him.
“I’m chasing bats!” his voice came singing back to me. “Wanna’ come?”
“Wait up!”
Weeks later, Guy’s wife, Minnie, threw him out. He and North moved onto the Susie Q., but Guy always managed to get Minnie to take North during the summer, so he could go to Alaska. He paid child support in fish.
Minnie taught classes in her living room with names like Nurturing The Soul of The Divorced Woman, and she’d make North go outside so there wouldn’t be any male energy in the house.
For years, Guy and Minnie traded North, back-and-forth, like a bad catch.
North and I were together all the time then, running wild, while Mom and Guy were up at the house in bed or down at Ralph’s getting drunk. We stuffed ourselves with blackberries, searched for agates and urchins, snuck onto yachts in the harbor.
During the winter, on cold rainy nights, Guy and North stayed at our place. North slept on the couch, but more often than not he came and stood in my doorway, his shadow stretching across the moonlit room. He was my shadow. Everywhere I went, he went, and I let him sleep in my bed.
A storm blows in off the sound and rain pelts the window hard for several minutes. Curt McGrath comes in, pushing his dark, wet hair out of his face. Curt’s an artist. His paintings of naked women and island landscapes are for sale at the Blackfish Gallery. He’s a few years older than North and buys him beer sometimes. Maybe that’s how their friendship started. I stare at him for clues about North. I don’t know what I expect to see. He winks at me, and I have to turn away to hide my pink face. I don’t like Curt. I may wonder about him the way I wonder about the guys on the Island Construction crew. Some of them are young with long legs and muscled arms, but North is the one I want to be with.
I’m hungry now. This is the way it is. One minute I can’t stomach anything, the next I can barely control myself. I buy ice cream at Harmon’s Market and make my own sundaes with whipped cream, walnuts, and cherries. Mom would kill me if she knew how much I spend. But I add to the grocery money with what I make from beer and pop returnables that I gather on the beaches. So she never really knows.
After Reva waits on Curt, I put my hand up to get her attention. Reva is over six feet and once told me she wears a double D bra and a size fourteen shoe.
“Another lousy day in paradise,” she says, nodding toward the window. “How you doing, Francie? You look hungry enough to eat the ass off a dog.”
Sometimes I don’t know what to say to Reva.
“We got French toast and hash browns with your name on it.”
“Sounds good. Can I get a piece of cobbler, too?”
“See, I knew it. Got your appetite back. Somebody kicking around in there?”
She reaches down and touches my belly. She smells like patchouli oil and cooking grease, and I almost lose my appetite.
Nobody touched me before I got pregnant, and now people I hardly know will put their hands on me when the only one whose hands I want is North.
“You’re pretty big for what—five months? Maybe you’re having twins. ’Course I was as big as a house when I was pregnant with Trevor.”
She’d have to be.
“I had that pregnancy diabetes,” she says. “I wasn’t allowed French toast or candy or anything with sugar in it. Sometimes I’d cheat and get Sam to go out and buy me a Snickers.”
I know if I say anything, she’ll keep on talking, and I’ll never get my breakfast.
“I figured with the nuts and all it wasn’t that bad. I’m trying out being a vegan now.” Reva doesn’t really need to have a two-way conversation.
After scribbling down my order, she says, “You know North hasn’t been in for ages.”
I shrug and try to appear uninterested. I know he comes here. He likes the waffles.
“He isn’t worth it, Francie. I’ll tell you who would be, though.” She nods her head toward Curt, lowers her voice. “Isn’t he the best-looking guy on the island? Why don’t you go after him? You’re a free woman.”
“I’m pregnant.”
“Guys don’t mind.” She leans down and whispers, “Sam used to love to do it doggie style with me when I was pregnant with Trev.”
I cover my ears. “God, Reva.”
“Just thought it might be useful information.” She walks away swinging her colossal hips.
I don’t think I would like being a waitress. From what I’ve seen, people are looking for more than just coffee and a meal. They want you to listen to their troubles, settle arguments, and sleep with them. Mrs. Henry said I should think about going to college for art. I like to draw puffins and sea stars and the spotted insides of Foxglove. But Mom says the only thing a degree in art would be good for is wiping your ass.
I glance up at Curt who is reading the Island News. He makes a living as an artist. But he doesn’t have a baby to take care of.
After Reva brings my breakfast, I cover it in syrup from the small metal pitcher and devour everything on my plate, like some frenzied bird of prey.
Hippy Rob goes to use the bathroom. He has the longest, blondish dreadlocks you’ll ever see. Curt leaves. North isn’t coming in today. Maybe he’s back in school. I heard a rumor he got kicked out when he came to school drunk and threw up on the superintendent’s car. I also heard he was dating Mary Womack. It’s high entertainment around here to spread rumors, and I don’t believe the one about Mary.
• • •
Down on the road outside of Ralph’s, I have to step back when a pick-up drives past, spraying mud and water into the air. It has a bumper sticker that says Ski Naked, and the cab is covered in decals from Mount Baker and Mount Hood. Dark clouds move in over the harbor. It will probably rain again. The air smells of cedar and salt. I wonder how the air smells in other places or what it’s like to walk down a city street or stand in a desert.
This is what Nettle Island looks like. There aren’t many paved roads. If you keep going down this one, the first house you’ll come to is ours, which is good for Mom, because she only has to drive drunk a little ways home at night. Or, if she gets too drunk, she can leave her truck and walk. If you keep on going, you’ll see a long line of smooth red Madrone trees. Madrones are beautiful but greedy, twisting around and pushing other trees out of the way to sun themselves on the rocky bluffs. The road veers away from the shoreline to alpine meadows and farm fields with bored-looking cows. There’s a turn off at the top of a rise that brings you back to the water and to Minnie’s house. I think North is living there now.
If you’re wondering why I just don’t go and see if he’s there, it’s because I think he should come to me. I have already left enough messages for him on Minnie’s phone where I sound like a begging dog.
If you stay on this road you’ll end up in the village. Stubbs’s Hardware sits at the top of the hill. There’s a talking coke machine out front. It asks you how you are, and then says, Thank you. You just bought a Coke! Even if you actually bought an orange crush.
We have a small library, post office, market, Harbor Side Hairdressers, where Mom works, Cedar’s Saloon, and The Tipsy Turtle. There are more bars per capita on Nettle than any of the other islands out here. I don’t know if this is an actual fact. I heard someone say it once. The island doesn’t end at the village. On the other side is the Hotel Arletta. People say the old woman, Arletta, has lived there her entire life, and now she sits by the window in the musty dance hall and never leaves, like she’s Miss Havisham from that Dickens’ book we read in school. You can’t actually sleep at the hotel, but the outdoor bar is open. It sits high up on a sea cliff, and, on a clear night, you can see all the way to the shimmering lights of Victoria. We are just one small island among a sea of hundreds.
If you go in the other direction, past Ralph’s, you’ll come to the Bushnells’. They raise buffalo. Cora and Paul serve buffalo burgers on Friday nights, but I’ve never eaten one. The road ends at the Bushnell place, but a rocky path leads to a secluded beach. This is where North and I made the baby.
Last summer, North came by our house, while I had been up the road picking salmonberries. The house we rent is on a hill above the road. Wooden steps lead the way up to the small front porch. I found him sitting on the landing. His eyes were red from crying, not drinking. I know him well enough to know the difference.
I put the small pail of berries down on the flat railing and sat beside him. “What’s wrong?”
“Mom’s got a new boyfriend. Calls himself Cowboy.”
“What happened to Wayne?”
“Dwayne.” He shrugged. “While she’s dragging boxes of Cowboy’s shit into the house, he’s loading a high-powered hunting rifle, and when I tell him hunting season’s in the fall, and you can’t use those on the island, only buckshot or slugs, he points the fuckin’ thing at my head and says I look like an Indian an’ how about we play cowboy meets Indian? I turn an’ leave, thinking this fuck is going to shoot me in the back. Then I hear Mom calling him in for Chai tea, and he says, ‘See ya later, ya little shit.’”
“That’s awful. You can’t stay there.”
“I know, but where am I gonna go? Dad’s not around.”
“You can stay here.”
“Your mom hates me. She calls me a quiet little shit.”
“Well, I don’t.” I took his hand.
He looked at me, and then we practically fell back on the landing. We had started kissing long before this day, in among the fir trees, behind the house, but we’d never gone all the way. Now his hand was down my shorts, and I was pulling him tight against me, when a car stopped in front of the house. Thinking it was Mom, we jolted up. But it was only someone trying to get cell phone service, holding her phone out the window and pointing it toward the marina.
“Let’s get out of here,” North said.
We walked to the far end of the beach, to the cove where we’d built a little playhouse out of beach wood when we were younger. We smoothed a place in the sand and lay down. There was no roof, unless you count the tops of Madrone trees. His hands were trembling when he touched me.
Sex hurt, and I thought it went too fast—that there should be more to it. What I liked most was being able to touch him anywhere I wanted, down his back, over the curve of his butt, run my tongue over the tips of his teeth. My favorite part, though, was when it was over and we held each other like we’d always been that way.
Mom had warned me about using birth control if I started fooling around. But that first time wasn’t planned. We used condoms every time after that, until one day when he said he wanted to try it without. We took a chance. That wasn’t too smart. Like everyone is always saying, it only takes once. We went back to using condoms, but there wasn’t much point. We didn’t know it then, though. We spent the next month not knowing, drinking cold beers on the hood of Gary Ireland’s boat. He let us take it out sometimes and race around in it. There is a myth that if you touch the water in Haro Strait, which connects the Strait of Georgia to the Strait of Juan de Fuca, you’ll never leave the islands. We thought if we touched the water at the same time we’d always stay together. He wet my lips; I wet his bangs and forehead. It might seem silly, but it was better than a ring, or a promise. Rings get lost, promises broken. Afterward we crept onto someone’s private island, got high and fooled around.
Now I worry if the weed and beer have hurt my baby.
• • •
I’m out of breath by the time I get home, climb all the steps. I get so tired now. I feel like one of the fat harbor seals that lie around on the rocks all day. I sit on the landing to rest.
Mr. Butliger drives past in the empty school bus. You can imagine what the kids have done with his name. He’ll park the bus in his yard until it’s time to pick up the half-day kindergartners. That stinking bus—damp feet and disinfectant—already another life. Other than Mrs. Henry, I don’t miss anyone at school. The girls eye you up and down, looking for flaws, deciding about your clothes. They spread rumors about Mom and men on the island. Some of the men married, some of the rumors true. I don’t fit in with these girls. North has always been my best friend.
• • •
When my period didn’t seem like it was ever going to come, I went to the doctor. I don’t really like the doctor here. I see him driving around in his island beater, trying to look poor. He says hi to you in the grocery store, like he knows what’s inside you, just because he sewed your arm up once.
After he told me I was pregnant, he said, “You have some choices here.” There were only three choices, and none of them seemed all that great to me. I sat there on the examining table, scrunching the square of paper that covered my lap.
“Take some time to think about this, Francie, but not too much time.”
I walked out of the doctor’s office and all the way across the island to Minnie’s house. North moved back in after she broke up with Troy, who came after Cowboy.
We were up in his room, sitting on his bed, the sweet and sour sea breeze blowing through the open window, when I told him we were going to have a baby.
“Shit,” he said. “I didn’t think this would happen. God, I’m an idiot.”
“No, you’re not.” I kissed him softly, parting his lips with my tongue. We lay back on the bed, and he helped pull my shirt off, put his mouth to one of my nipples, which were already swollen. I was thinking about how right this felt. How we would be good parents, better than our own.
He leaned over me, pushing his bangs out of his eyes. “Is this dangerous?”
“The baby’s just a little thing.”
“Then it’s not too late? I mean you don’t have to have it.”
“I want it. Don’t you?”
He rolled away from me. “We’re not even eighteen yet.”
“It’ll be all right.”
“You always say that. But this ain’t right. This won’t ever be right.” He got off the bed and put both hands into his hair. “How long you known?”
“I just saw the doctor. Just now.”
He paced around the small room, then stopped and stared out his window for a long time without saying anything.
“Are you just going to stand there?”
He swung around. “You sure it’s even mine?”
“You know I haven’t been with anyone else.”
“Yeah, really? What about Curt? I saw how you were looking at him last time we were together. Remember? Outside his studio, sitting in the bed of his truck, swinging your legs. Maybe this kid is his.”
“That’s crazy.” I put my shirt back on. “You were so drunk that night, you wouldn’t know who I was looking at.”
“Yeah, well, you’re crazy if you think I’m raising somebody else’s kid.” Then I laughed because I guessed the game he was playing. His face blazed. “You better get the hell out of here. I’m not having a baby with you.”
“How can you say that? It’s not my fault you didn’t use a condom!” I ran past him, slamming his bedroom door, and then again slamming the downstairs door as I left the house. I never thought that would be the last conversation we’d have.
I waited a week to tell Mom. A week is a long time when you’re pregnant. There are more symptoms. The night I told her, I threw up twice. I didn’t actually tell her. She guessed.
“Oh my God—you’re pregnant, aren’t you?” She had stopped off at Ralph’s on her way home from work and had a few. “I can’t fucking believe it! What have I always told you? I’ve always told you! Weren’t you listening?”
“It just happened. I don’t know.” I was crying.
“Oh, you’re crying now. Wait till you have a baby to take care of.” She stumbled back a little, went to the fridge, pulled out a beer, opened the can, took a deep breath and then a long drink. Keeping her eyes on me, she lit up a cigarette and took three quick drags.
“It’s North’s, right?”
I nodded.
“That quiet little shit. We’ll have to take you to Mount Vernon and get you fixed. It’ll cost a fucking fortune.”
I’m not a cat that you take to the vet to get fixed. I thought this, but I didn’t say it. I left her standing there and locked myself in my room.
“What are you going to do?” she yelled from the other side. “Throw your whole shitty life away? How could you do this to me!” She started screaming, sounding crazy. “Shit, Shit, Shiiiiit!”
I held pillows over my head.
There was silence on the other side of the door, for a moment, until she started up again. “Fine. You want a baby? You want to fuck up your life the way I did? Go right ahead. But you’ll have to get a job, ’cause I am not raising another goddamn baby!”
• • •
I can see the Washington State Ferry making it’s way past Nettle. North and I used to ride around on it, just to feel like we were going somewhere. It’s free as long as you don’t get off on the mainland and try and get back on again. The rain is going to start up any minute. We live in the Olympic rain shadow, sunny compared to the rest of the Pacific Northwest. Most of the rain that does fall, though, falls in the winter. The tourists flock here all summer long, but, like a great bird migration, they leave before the weather turns. They don’t know a thing about life here. During the winter, winds barrel down from British Columbia, battering the island, and all of us still here, senseless.
My baby will be born in the spring. Everything always looks better in the spring, when the island is covered in Indian paintbrush and Wild Nootka rose. I don’t think I’ll be a bad mother. I know it will be hard, but it won’t be impossible. Mom did it. She was only a few years older than I am when she had me. Then a few years after that, my father left, and she was on her own.
North loved me when we made the baby, and if the myth of Haro Strait is true, he might love me again. Don’t you think?
Hippy Rob rides by on the community bicycle. His dreads are so long I’m surprised they don’t get caught in the spokes. The sails on the boats in the harbor flap in the wind as it picks up, and the trolling poles on the Susie Q. jerk back and forth. I know the rain is coming, but I want to sit and wait a little longer.
Anne Trooper’s fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in PRISM international, The Blotter, and The Tusculum Review. She has had work short-listed twice for the Fish Publishing Short Story Prize, received honorable mention for The Ledge Fiction Award, and been awarded fellowships to the Summer Literary Seminars and The Vermont Studio Center. She has been a finalist for a number of contests, most recently the Arts & Letters Fiction Prize, the Rick DeMarinis Short Story Contest, and The Tucson Festival of Books. She currently lives in Vermont.
Photo on Foter.com